This week, the public continued to grapple with the revelation that Facebook disclosed more than 50 million users’ account information to the right-wing political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. LPE contributor Frank Pasquale has previously described how we should understand the big internet platforms as exercising a form of “functional sovereignty,” a description seemed as apt than this week as ever, when people realized how little government regulation restricted Facebook’s use of their private information. Here are three recent pieces that have caught our attention with an LPE take on the issue:

Beware the Big Five – the U.S. military and intelligence sector’s venture capital funding has fostered the tech sector’s consolidation and permitted the growth of private empires on the back of publicly funded R&D.

Facebook Isn’t Just Violating Our Privacy – Facebook is insistent on seeing its failures as harming individuals, never society as a whole, but we must insist on using collective questions to challenge Silicon Valley’s libertarian perspective.

Banking Against (Black) Capitalism: On “The Color of Money” – LARB reviews LPE contributor Mehrsa Baradaran’s new book The Color of Money, which shows how black-owned community banks have been held up as a way to create a parallel economy, even as they have systematically served the financial interests of white America. This racial capitalism analysis of our financialized economy shows why racial justice demands a structural approach, rather than the promotion of a “separate but equal system of black capitalism.”

Mainstream economists tend to frame employment policy as a series of tragic trade-offs. If policymakers raise the minimum wage, they are told, employment will inevitably fall, perhaps precipitously. Requirements for vacations, too, might crash the job market. (Never mind that dozens of other prosperous countries mandate paid vacation time.) Technocrats of the center left complain about employer-sponsored insurance as a dreadful distortion of the labor market. Sick pay, family medical leave, maternity and paternity leave—all have been blasted by one economist or another as a drag on economic growth and employment levels. “You are only hurting the people you are trying to help,” labor activists are told, again and again.

Such models are intuitively plausible, thanks to what James Y. Kwak has called “economism:” simplistic perspectives resulting from mechanical applications of supply and demand models to complex social phenomena. In general, the more costly something is, the less consumers will demand it. That reasoning leads, in turn, to more sweeping claims about the need to deregulate labor markets. If there is one policy issue most likely to consolidate bipartisan consensus among economically minded technocrats, it is a suspicion of barriers to entry in the workforce, including occupational licensure and “credentialization.” They lament the former as a paradigmatic example of state power hijacked by private interests to enrich themselves. Credentialization is framed as a market failure: The unjustified preference of bosses for workers educated in ways not directly related to the tasks they will be performing at work.

The bottom line of this economism is grim. To the extent the state requires certain qualifications of workers, or workers themselves demand time off or other entitlements, there will be fewer jobs. Economist Tyler Cowen asks whether “whether workers might not enjoy ‘too much’ tolerance and freedom in the workplace.” While cash wages are taxed, “perks” are not, so employers will be tempted to oversupply perks at the expense of wages (or, even more troublingly to neoclassical diehards, at the expense of shareholders).